Missiles
Missiles are one of the two types of unmanned craft in COADE. They are essentially a rocket with a remote control and a bomb strapped to them, but their design gets a lot more fiddly than that. Missiles are broadly classified by their size: micromissiles (ones with a diameter of less than 120mm and a weight less than 3 kilograms), missiles (heavier than 3 kg and less than a ton), and megamissiles (heavier than a ton). Missiles are the bread and butter of most stock ships' strategic damage output, and can retain their viability against community-designed ships if designed well. Missile Design Propellant It's suggested that you use a chemical rocket for most missiles, as nuclear-thermal rockets are a bit too expensive for something that your capship is going to be chucking out in the hundreds. Monopropellant rockets are certainly viable for particularly tiny micromissiles or when you're tired of juggling different tank masses, but bipropellant rockets are the preferred way to get the missile headed towards its doom, as they offer far superior exhaust velocity for only a marginal increase in complexity. By far and away, the most effective bipropellant is hydrogen fluoride, able to get greater than 5 km/s exhaust velocity. However, HF would be the most hazardous thing on the ship (yes, including the reactors) if used in real life, as fluoride is an extremely nasty chemical with a tendency to eat through everything at an alarming pace, so realism-oriented players may want to opt for a different propellant. For real-world propellants, hydrogen-oxygen rockets (hydrolox) are the most efficient in terms of pure exhaust velocity, but methane-oxygen (methalox) rockets have a far superior propellant density, so they're often the go-juice of choice. Other viable options include RP-1. Some notes on Propulsion by Dwwolf from the CDE forums. NTR rockets are high performance for slightly more cost. You can use very dense propellants with them ( like decane or RP-1 ) which means smaller missiles with less armor and fuel tank deadweight and cost. It tends to even out to a degree. Control Use a high aspect-ratio control for micromissiles so that they have a small diameter. Outside of micromissiles, the shape of the remote control is pretty much irrelevant. For an in-depth article on remote control guidance algorithm tuning, see Remote Control Tuning for Lunatics. ''(Somebody else create this article, I'm fairly hopeless at RC tuning.) Some notes on control by Dwwolf from CDE forums. Augmented Proportional navigation is the gold standard for FragHe and KKV. The standard guidance package works well for this. Tinker with boost and final fuel reserves to taste. EFP ( from blast launchers on missiles) : Final should be put on Pure Pursuit or Augmented PP, this to force the nose to be on the target. If you want to create a kill vehicle that gets it main boost from a gun or coilgun then you need to reserve about 90+% of its fuel for the final phase. And make sure that it has low accel, <2g, and a long burn time. Micro decane NTR are very appropriate here. Something related to Control is the propulsion of the missile. Generally you want to limit engine gimbal to about 5 degrees otherwise the missile will gyrate wildly and it will burn off fuel reserves to correct this. You also want high engine RPM to make sure the missile can respond in a timely manner. Missile turnabout times <1s tend to fall into the "buck like a bronco" missiles. Alternatively use 3 smaller engines with a combined thrust 1/3 of what you'd want to produce the desired accel on your whole missile and remove the gimbal from them. This usually is a fool proof method to get a functioning missile/guidance combo. Warheads In this game, we get two main types of warheads. Pure '''nuclear' warheads are great at heating up targets and toasting Whipple shields, but do little else. Fragmentation (frag) warheads are excellent for doing damage to enemy armor and fragile internals, but enemy Whipple shields can be quite a nuisance for them. Pure HE '''warheads. No. * ''Conventional warheads'' Warheads that use chemical explosives to detonate, usually with a thick plate of metal in front of them to form a flak projectile. 'Flak-' A bomb which spreads into hundreds or even thousands of micro projectiles which are devastating against Armour and radiators, but have to get within a few hundred feet to be useful, and their damage is directly related to their velocity compared to the target, as well as their accuracy and distance at which they explode. 'HE-' The most useless explosive type. It barely does anything unless it explodes inside of a ship or on the surface. There is no point to using a HE warhead unless you have extremely specialized weaponry and you know exactly what you are doing. * ''Nuclear warheads'' All but the very smallest missiles can take nuclear warheads, seeing as the smallest conceivable nukes in are less than 60 mm in diameter and are hundreds to millions times more powerful than HE per mass. They range from the hundred ton to the megaton range, with the largest being almost nine million tons of TNT equivalent. They emit bright flashes of light which act similar to lasers, and they ablate away armor and destroy radiators from a longer distance than flak, but do not do as much damage on near misses due to them not making a penetrating hole in the armor. Current nukes do not emit crew killing radiation, which makes them hundreds of times less powerful than they would be in real life. * ''Exotic weapon systems'' Normal warheads are not the only option. Currently, the communities' weapons of choice are the NEFP (nuclear explosively formed penetrator), KKV (kinetic kill vehicle) and NBF "Brimstone" nuclear-boosted fragmentation warheads. The '''Brimstone warhead, consisting of a low-yield (less than 120 t) nuclear warhead capped by disks of fragmentation warheads with little explosive in them, provides the best of both worlds. The nuclear blast cooks the target and strips away its whipple shield, while the fragmentation warheads eat through the armor below. The NEFP, alternately, just looks at the enemy's feeble attempts at armoring their pitiful vessel and laughs. It consists of a thick disk of very sturdy material (represented in-game by either a radiation shield or a 1-fragment explosive charge) on top of a low-yield nuclear bomb. The bomb is detonated at what are (for missiles, anyways) stand-off ranges of anywhere from 1 to 5 kilometers. The plate is propelled towards the target at a frankly unknown speed- estimates range from the Pascal-B result of 66 km/s to relativistic velocities. This, naturally, annihilates anything in its path. However, NEFP is hands-down the most difficult type of warhead to create, and only a few members of the community know how. The final type of unconventional warhead- if you can call it a warhead- is the KKV, or kinetic kill vehicle. All this means is that the entire vehicle slams into the target, instead of being destroyed by its own warhead. If you can get a suitably massy missile traveling at a decent clip to impact the enemy, it can be extremely effective at knocking massive holes in them. However, near misses do absolutely nothing to damage the target, and are effectively wasted. * A note Vanilla pure explosive warheads are, in a word, shit. Due to the way explosions work in space, their main methods of damaging objects (massive change in pressure and a fireball) are basically useless. Instead, fragmenting warheads take all that energy and put it into a bunch of shrapnel, so it's suggested that you go with them instead. Some alternative notes on missile payloads. By Dwwolf from CDE forums. NEFP doesnt function...it was an artifact of testing single missiles in a combat instance that sometimes teleported the warhead to the target. It has never worked with more than 1 missile in combat.= *bug* You can simulate EFP with blast launchers firing inert payloads in the nose of your missile Combining FragHe with Nukes is valid...depending on the targets armor scheme. Flash protected whipple shields will withstand most nukes. Adding frags increases the damage potential by adding a different damage dealing strategy. Nukes themselves are usefull mostly in flash frying the enemy propulsion systems from behind. Any detonation of an embedded payload will detonate any other payload near it. It will also delete any other component (including armor ) of the missile. Armor Missile armor can be divided into three types: anti-laser, anti-projectile, and anti-nuke. However, both types of armor benefit heavily from sloping noses. Anti-laser armor consists of a thick layer of aramid fiber or other, more specialist, anti-laser armor, and serves to keep the missile operating against doomlasers. Anti-projectile armor serves to protect against slug-firing CIWS, and is usually a thin Whipple shield and the player's bulk armor of choice (boron, vanadium-chromium steel, or what-have-you). Anti-nuke armor consists of a thin layer of titanium carbide, which is all that's required to protect against all but the strongest of nuclear-armed anti-missile solutions, and therefore doesn't need to be a standalone, specialized type of armor and often doubles as the Whipple shield. Some extra notes on Armor by Dwwolf from CDE forums. Armor is something of a paradox in space..it increases weight and profile. Weight means your missile has less dV and accelleration which means it is in the enemies effective range for a longer time. It also impacts the missile carrier in this way. A bigger profile means your missile is easier to hit as well. So it is best to combine functions..Aramid is reasonably good vs KE ...as well as very good vs. Lasers....very expensive though. Rubber is a cheap anti laser material. Silica areogel is very light and good antiflash armor, decent vs lasers if thick. Personally I start at 2mm Amorphous carbon topped by 1.5 cm Si-gel for my smallest missiles. My next heaviest class of missiles has 2mm A-carbon 1mm diamond and 2cm Si-gel. Starting at this class I also add a 2.5cm Si-gel nosecone. Extensive armor I reserve for the heaviest nukes in my arsenal.